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Energy Regenerative Armour
Energy Regenerative Armour or ERA was a highly advanced armour technology employed by The Royal Allegiance from the late 2600s onwards. Usage ERA was employed on all Allegiance warship designs from 2651 onwards, most armoured vehicles and the larger aerial combat vehicles. When used on tanks, it granted them near-invulnerability to small arms, directed energy weapons, explosives and kinetic weapons for a prolonged period of time. While its substantial energy requirements limited its use in smaller craft such as light VTOLS and supersonic fighters, it was utilised on craft such as the ATL-772 Sabre Dropship and CT-40 Vanguard Heavy Transport, which gave them an unparalleled resistance to enemy fire. When employed on warships, such as the newer Crown-class Dreadnoughts and Regent-class Frigates, it merely augmented the resilience of the vessel. While its power requirements were easily met by huge Zero-Point Generators, it also offered huge advantages when engaging in combat with other spacecraft. It could splinter MAC rounds, shrug off high explosive and armour piercing rounds and harmlessly absorb directed energy weapons. When antimatter and nuclear weapons were used against ERA, the resulting energy increased the impregnability of the armour by several hundred times. However, it was possible to overload the armour by concentrated antimatter weapons or directed energy weapons of a colossal scale. It was only ever used as an addition to more conventional armour technologies, for instance ACE Armour. As ERA was dependent on energy sources and was only effective with strong armour layers underneath, vehicles only capable of mounting ERA or ACE usually chose the latter for its low maintenance and reliability, not to mention its non-existant energy requirements. One of the main weaknesses of the ERA was kinetic energy penetrators. While it was nearly negligible, they had slightly more effect on damaging the armour than other weapon forms. Technology ERA consisted of two layers of armour. The first was an energy-ablative, superconductive metamaterial layer. This layer effectively trapped almost all of the energy from enemy fire, whether that be kinetic, chemical or others. While not providing the perfect defence, its primary function was to feed this energy to the layer below. This was a variable property, energy reactive layer of extremely advanced nanomaterial whose properties changed when exposed to massive energy. In short, the armour became stronger when under fire. This extremely adaptable and useful ability stemmed largely from the Forerunners, who employed a similar technology in their Keyships, renowned for their ability to withstand concentrated, localised fire even without shielding. This technology was only successfully reverse-engineered in 2642. The layer absorbed varying degrees of energy from the attack it was under, using this bombardment to directly increase the strength of the armour, by several hundred times. It absorbed close to 100% of the energy from directed energy weapons, including plasma and particle weapons sued by the Covenant and the Swarm respectively. It absorbed 96% of the kinetic energy and 98.5% of the chemical energy it was struck with. The secondary layer relied upon the primary layer functioning efficiently for it to operate. As protection was only a secondary function for the primary layer of armour, it did not have an incredible resistance to enemy fire, leaving that to the lower levels. As a result, over time the effectiveness of the first and second layers decreased. The more damage the primary layer took, the less effective the second layer was. Eventually, after heavy and concentrated fire, the effectiveness of these layers was rendered nil. However, units armoured with ERA rarely exposed themselves to so much fire to allow this to happen, only rarely occurring in extended and intensive combat arenas.